The Five Stages of Grief
by rpmuleftw
Summary: Gaara recovers from a tragedy. LeexGaara/GaaraxLee. AU. Rated for mature themes.
1. Denial

I own nothing.

This will contain five short parts.

Reviews much appreciated.

/

_"The night I lost you, someone pointed me toward the five stages of grief. Go that way, they said, it's easy, like learning to climb stairs after the amputation. And so I climbed." - 'The Five Stages of Grief' by Linda Pastan_

/

Lee likes three eggs for breakfast cooked sunny-side up, the yolk just barely cooked to the point where the gooey yellow will run off the egg to the side of the plate if a fork is poked in. Remembering he likes to scoop this up with toast, Gaara takes a break from making sure breakfast is cooked just right and pops a piece of whole wheat bread in the toaster – the more grains the better, Lee always says, accompanied by some speech about vitamins enhancing his youthful strength which Gaara usually tunes out.

Cooked to perfection, and adding to the corner of the plate two strawberries from a carton that threatens to expire in two days, Gaara carefully sets the plate down on the other side of the table. He takes a seat and views the small mess he's made in the kitchenette. He decides he'll clean it up later, before he goes to work. Swallowing a spoonful of yoghurt, he glances toward the chair across from him.

"You should eat, Lee. You'll need your strength. Aren't you teaching that advanced jiu-jitsu class today?"

He frowns when Lee doesn't answer and lifts the cup of juice up to his lips. "I'm going to be home late today. Temari wants to have dinner with me."

Silence.

After he finishes his meal, he throws away all three sunny-side up eggs, the toast, and the strawberries, and places the tableware in the dishwasher. He hears Lee's favourite song being hummed, but after whipping around at the table, realises the sound had been coming from his own mouth.

x

The dinner with Temari is short and awkward.

"He forgot that it was his turn to shop for groceries this week," Gaara tells her over an untouched steak and salad, "I made the trip instead, but it's fine. I had to visit the bank anyway. How's Shikamaru?"

Temari gives him a pitying, sympathetic look and doesn't answer. He doesn't pull away when her hand rests over his.

x

Lee doesn't say anything when Gaara, after returning home, asks if he wants to watch some television before bed, so he decides to retire early.

"Good night," he murmurs, curled in bed after the light has been switched off. "I love you." The large green sweatshirt he's clutching is unresponsive. Gaara still inhales the familiar scent deeply until he drifts into slumber.

Nights, he dreams. His body hurtles hurtles through the sky, the image grainy and dark like an old silent film, plummeting toward the ground at a thousand miles an hour. Terror seizes his heart as he grapples frantically at the air for a hold he never finds. The pastures below zoom closer and closer, and every night his body jerks awake just before the impact, shaking and soaked in cold sweat.


	2. Anger

Part two of five. Reviews are appreciated.

xx

"_I hate you!" _Gaara screams, fists shaking, face twisted something ugly. He grabs the sides of the chair and throws it into the fridge; it bounces off and crashes to the floor, where one of the legs splinters. The heel of his boot comes down on it hard before he stalks into the living room. The crispy brown plant he hasn't watered in a week meets the wall with an unsatisfying shatter.

Lee had been the one who decided to hang up all of the pictures.

There are plenty of them – Lee smiling with his thumb raised to the camera, Gaara staring as if he'd rather sit through a three-hour traffic jam than pose pleasantly for the click of the shutter. The outside of their apartment complex covered with snow, Lee whooping and cheering after he won the sledding race with Naruto, who stands to the side grinning good-naturedly and holding an old wooden toboggan. Gaara actually smiling for once, a wry, thin-lipped gesture as he sits on a beach blanket just a few yards up from the summer waves with a towel around his shoulders.

It's another universe.

Breathing heavily, the redhead feels pumped with adrenaline, as if he's just consumed a gallon of coffee, or as if he's just stumbled over the edge of a cliff. He winds back an arm and punches the first picture adorning the wall. Ignoring the pain, he bombards the opposite wall with the other two, and they shatter to the floor.

Shards of the glass frame embed themselves in his skin and later, the doctor would say he's lucky none of the lacerations became infected.

Instead of screaming again he snarls, the low raw noise of a predatory animal stalking to kill. His throat is unused to the strain and quickly feels scratched and irritated. Murder plagues his mind; he doesn't care what, or whom, but he needs a way to transfer this torture onto someone else, onto _anything_ else.

He breaks three plates and rips the phone from the wall and tears out the hairs from his head. A neighbour complains about the noise.

The pain doesn't even begin to fade.

x

Gaara bursts through the front doors of the hospital, trembling. Papers around the welcome desk go flying as he knocks them off, shoving people aside.

"Why couldn't you save him?!" he seethes at the frightened secretary in little more than a whisper, the low volume of his voice detracting naught from its hostility. The secretary takes one look at the fire in his eyes before her chair rolls back, and her fingers move to press something on the underside of the desk. He imagines her head crushed to bits, crimson blood spurting through the severed jugular, blood and brains flying in streamers and cascading like party confetti down the walls, on the empty chairs, splattering heads of the panicking orderlies. It wouldn't be a fit enough punishment.

"It's all your fault!" He is shaking too much to stand.

A pink-haired nurse escorts him to a private room until he calms down, and Naruto arrives to take him home, mentioning only once they're on the road that he's lucky nobody glimpsed the sharpened kitchen knife Gaara'd hidden in his coat.

x

Fury is easy to feel. The hatred blinds him, consumes him, swallows him whole, and he relishes in being able to feel _something_.

His fingernails leave deep red welts on his shoulders, the backs of his arms, over the organ clenching and twisting in his chest.

With a choked cough and a hiccough Gaara kneels to the floor among the shattered glass and the torn pictures, not even noticing the wetness drying on his cheeks.


	3. Bargaining

Gaara hasn't believed in a god since he was a small child, but he finds himself kneeling next to the bed anyway.

How does he do this? Should he bow his head? Are his hands supposed to be folded? He lets them rest on the bed palm-down and stares straight ahead, feeling awkward any other way.

It comes out in a whisper. "I'll give anything. If you're there. Please." He can't remember ever sounding this pathetic before. "Anything."

Memories flood back: The day at the amusement park eating funnel cake for the first time, and Lee laughing when he gets frosted powder on his chin. Waking up in the morning after another nightmare and having someone there to calm him down and bring him back to reality. A muscular body moving against his in a tangle of naked limbs, the warmth of nesting against each other afterward.

His lips moves in pleas promises he can't possibly deliver. Anything.

This isn't right, some part of his mind tells him. Nothing is.

The bedsheets are crumpled. Even as he speaks, he knows his words fall on deaf ears.

xx

There isn't any food in the house.

Lee always kept – keeps – _kept_ – a strict healthy, high-energy diet to keep him energised and moving. More than once Gaara had had to suffer through Gai's self-proclaimed Famous Super Protein Chow, which Gaara claims tastes like stale porriage but Lee had long since declared as one of his favourite foods.

Now the refrigerator is bare. Cupboard doors swing wide open, a layer of dust settling over their empty shelves.

"See?" he says to no one, face tilted up for no comprehensible reason. "It's all healthy. You can - " He hesitates, licks his lips. Boxes of noodles, leftover take-out pizza, cabbage, jelly, every item of food he had possessed overflows the trash can. Sitting on the counter is a freshly made pot of spicy curry: An offering.

There's nothing he can protest against now, nothing keeping him away.

The world tilts as Gaara wavers where he stands, seeing spots. "You can come back now," he shouts at nothing.

xx

After the last of the vomit is flushed down the toilet, Gaara hunches over the sink, fingers on one hand clenching hard against the white ceramic, the other holding a steel kitchen knife.

_If I had made him stay home that night – or if I had gone out – it would have been me, wouldn't it?_

He can't bear to look at himself in the mirror anymore, and directs his thoughts to the faucet instead. Rhythmic drops of water plink steadily against the drain, swallowing the liquid as greedily as a ravenous lion given a lick of milk.

_Do you want me?_

In his mind, the knife shines crimson red and his pale body lies lifeless on the tiled floor. Is that would it would take? Would Lee rise up, take his place, go on living life like he is supposed to?

He wants so badly to believe.


	4. Depression

Thank you for the reviews.

Part four of five.

xx

Gaara pushes the cart down the grocery store aisle at a snailpace. Normally he zips through, picking out only what is on the list and calculating exactly how much he can spend. Now, he pauses at every other item, staring hollowly at bold letters printed on shiny wrappings.

The Oreos are laughing at him.

They remind Gaara of Lee's unnaturally large, dark eyes, warm and tender and full of life, or widened in surprised, or blinking slowly as they share a meal together.

By now, the lids would be half-rotten, skin tissue shrunken back, thick lashes long detached. He imagines maggots burrowing under the skin, chewing away at the decaying flesh of the eyeball. Empty sockets like black holes staring at wooden panelling six feet under the earth.

With a violent cringe, Gaara shoves the cart down the remainder of the snacks aisle with more force than necessary. He nearly knocks over two children and a table of pastries.

People are looking at him strangely. It takes him fifteen minutes of mindless aisle-meandering to realise he has shown up wearing Lee's squirrel pyjama pants with matching bedroom slippers, obnoxious brown and grey things with fluffy, bright-eyed heads protruding from the front, tattered from years of wear.

He leaves without purchasing a thing.

xx

Temari is the first human being he sees in a week, _see_ being a loose term if one takes into account the hours he has spent staring mindlessly at the television, eyes not focused on the children's programs and the family sitcoms and the hour-long paid advertisements in which a lady slathered in makeup insists that this exquisite necklace set with real ten-carat diamonds is guaranteed to convince the loved one in his life to sashay into his arms forever for only two easy payments of more than he makes in half a year.

She takes one look at the flies buzzing around the moulded foods and he watches as she grabs a pair of gloves and the last heavy-duty sponge and scrubs away at the crusted grime and green-white fuzz. He watches as she wrinkles her nose at the nauseating smell of rotten salmon and decaying eggs. He watches as, when she finally finishes after what seems like a hundred hours, she puts everything back where it used to belong and stands facing him with one hand on her hip. There's sounds coming from her mouth that sound vaguely recognisable, but he doesn't want to hear them, and leaves.

xx

_Bzzzz._

What is that?

...

Is that the doorbell?

It has to be. The ringing in his own ears has long since faded.

It goes unanswered since Gaara doesn't feel like moving from his crumpled position under the covers. He doesn't feel like doing anything nowadays.

The off-white wall he's facing has a crack in it. A portion of the paint is peeling. There's a spiderweb in the corner; he hasn't cleaned in weeks.

With a lethargic movement his hand drags itself over to his stomach, feeling the bones and veins underneath. The ribs there stick out against his sallow, dry skin; it's hard to eat and exercise when he doesn't even have the strength to leave his bed.

_Bzzzz. Bzzzz._

The guest will have to leave eventually, he thinks.

Everything feels heavy; his headache hasn't gone away in days. The pit of his stomach is a cold stone ball, dragging him down like an anchor would a corpse to the darkest depths of the ocean.

Pangs of what feel like hunger stab at his stomach, but he can't move except to reach over to Lee's side of the bed and clutch the same green sweatshirt closer to his body. It doesn't smell like Lee anymore. For a split-second he has the urge to toss it to the edge of the bed but finds himself holding it tighter instead, squeezing it until he's practically strangling himself.

His eyes blink blearily; the puffy dark rings around his eyes stick out like a burglar mask or a raccoon. When is the last time he has slept? He can't recall.

Maybe, he envisions, the person at the door is Death coming to greet him. The idea comforts him - maybe this arduous and miserably journey, this hell, can _finally_ end. It almost makes him swing his legs over the side of the bed and amble over to the entrance, but they each feel three hundred pounds and before he even works up the willpower, the door opens anyway. Gaara never locks it anymore. He doesn't see the point.

A man in a hooded black sweatshirt stands over him. "I came to see how you're doing." His brother speaks with a careful air about him, like the wrong words could set off a bomb at any moment. Gaara rolls over in response so he doesn't have to look at him.

Kankuro persists. He says something about the phone being disconnected, about going out of his way to make this visit. "Your boss called. You haven't been to work in a week. He only hasn't fired you 'cause he knows, er...y'know, 'cause he knows what happened."

A plastic container full of steaming cooked food drops on the bedside table. Gaara wrinkles his nose at the offending smell and tries to pull the covers over his head, but Kankuro yanks them down.

"No," Gaara musters, voice stale and wheezy with disuse.

"You haven't eaten in two days," Kankuro points out, expecting the lack of response that follows without fail. His face flashes dark, frustrated. "Look, Gaara, you have to just accept it. Lee's - " Teal eyes bore into him in such a heavy, tortured stare that Kankuro cuts off before he can say the forbidden word. Feeling suddenly out of place, he fiddles with a trinket on the bureau and shifts from foot to foot in discomfort.

It takes too much effort just to breathe.

All he can do is close his eyes against the bleakness of the world and hope he never opens them again.


	5. Acceptance

The gravestone is modestly tucked away under a large tree and Gaara knows every inch of it, from its shiny black letters to the grainy but smooth texture of its curves to the daisy or two that pops up every year around the beginning of Spring.

He never brings flowers. Instead he sits by the hunk of granite, fingers tracing over the stray strands of grass, and speaks. He tells Lee about the newbie he hired at work, a pretty girl with brown hair and dark eyes. The Thanksgiving dinner Naruto invited him to. Kankuro's engagement to his long-term girlfriend. Twice-a-day visits become weekly, which turn into monthly, and soon it's only on the eve of that same day years ago that, at the break of dawn, his footsteps will pad into the graveyard and find their way to the familiar spot.

He has lunch with his co-workers, watches films with his siblings. He purchases a new cactus to make up for the old one, the kind that blooms one day per year before retreating to its hibernating statae. He sits down for only a moment and it turns into months; the world rushes by in a blur, colour trickles back in like paint on a canvas. Life whisks him along like a raging river and he's helpless to its tide.

xx

The glass picture frames have long since been swept up and disposed of. What photographs he can salvage he tapes together and slides into new frames with shiny new borders, once again on display in the living room. They are never again disturbed.

Half of his heart, already battered and scarred, is missing. The hollow hole in his chest never fills itself and the ache never dwindles.

For months now he's been falling, that same nightmare of plunging toward the ground at speeds unheard of. He wakes up just as often, unable to breathe, eyes darting madly for the source of his panic. That hasn't changed; Gaara doesn't think it will.

Only now, he's got a parachute.

xx

Sometimes, Gaara comes home and expects to see a bouncing green blob of energy ready to greet him after a long day at work.

Sometimes, if he rests his face against the clothing still in Lee's drawers, Gaara can still smell that musky scent; it comforts him on the worse days.

Sometimes, he lies in bed long after the stars have shown their twinkling faces and touches himself, remembering the feel of Lee's own fingers on his skin.

Every time, he's crushed by the sudden emptiness, and every time, the affliction in his heart twists and wreaks havoc on his body.

His feet trudge slowly toward a plateau that is always a mile away. He thinks it must be one of those trick staircases because ever time he thinks he's hit a new level, he finds himself right at the beginning again. Maybe one day, Gaara thinks, he'll get to the top.

As of now, it's never enough. It never will be.

_fin_


End file.
